WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION BY
HENRY HARLAND
ILLUSTRATED BY
SIMONT GUILHEM
London: The London Book Co. MCMVII.
*OCTAVE FEUILLET'S NOVELS*
To be serious seriously is the way of mediocrity. To be serious gaily is
not such an easy matter. To look on at the pantomime of things, and to
see, neatly separated, tragedy here, comedy opposite--to miss the
perpetual dissolution and resolution of the one into and out of the
other--is inevitable when eyes are purblind. _Diis aliter visum_.
Olympus laughs because it perceives so many capital reasons for pulling
a long face; and half the time pulls a long face simply to keep from
laughing. I imagine it is in some measure the Olympian manner of seeing
which explains the gay seriousness of the work of Octave Feuillet.
Octave Feuillet possesses to an altogether remarkable degree the art of
being serious not only gaily, but charmingly. This, to begin with,
places him and his stories in a particular atmosphere; and, if we
consider it, I think we shall recognise that atmosphere as something
very like the old familiar atmosphere of the fairy-tale. At any rate,
there is a delicate, a fanciful symbolism in Feuillet's work, which
breathes a fragrance unmistakably reminiscent of the enchanted forest.
For an instance, one may recall the chapter in _Un Mariage dans le
Monde_ which relates the escapade of Lionel and his betrothed on the day
before their wedding. A conventional mother, busy with preparations for
the ceremony, intrusts her daughter to the chaperonage of an old aunt,
who is, we might suppose, exactly the person for the office. But old
aunts are sometimes wonderfully made; sometimes they keep the most
unlooked-for surprises up those capacious old-fashioned sleeves of
theirs. This one was a fairy godmother in disguise, and, I suspect, a
pupil of the grimly-benevolent Blackstick. With good-humoured cynicism,
she remarks that the happiest period of even the happiest married life
is the day before it begins, and she advises her young charges to make
the most of it--chases them, indeed, from her presence. "Be off with
you, my children! Come, be off with you at once!" They escape to the
park, where they romp like a pair of truant school-children. That is
all; but in Feuillet's hands it becomes a fairy idyl. It serves,
besides, the symbolic purpose of striking at the outset the note of
joyousness which he means to repeat at the end, though the book is one
that threatens, almost to the last page, to end on a note of despair.
For _Un Mariage dans le Monde_, if far from being the most successful of
Feuillet's novels, exhibits, none the less, some of his cleverest
craftsmanship. He hoodwinks us into the fear that he meditates
disaster, only pleasantly, genially, at the right moment, to disappoint
us with the denouement we could have wished.
Feuillet's geniality, for that matter, runs through all his books, and
is one of the vital principles of his talent. It is never the flaccid
geniality, the amiability, of the undiscerning person; it is, rather,
the wise and alert geniality of the benign magician, who is sometimes
constrained to weave black spells, because that is a part of the game,
and in the day's work, as it were, but who puts his heart only into the
weaving of spells that are rose-coloured. This is perhaps why Feuillet's
nice people nearly always take flesh and live and breathe, his horrid
people hardly ever--another resemblance, by-the-bye, between him and the
writer of fairy-tales. The nice women, with their high-bred lovers, who
step so daintily through his pages, to the flutter of perfumed fans and
the rustle of fine silks, are as convincing as the palpitantly
convincing princesses of Hans Andersen and Grimm; but Feuillet's
villains and adventuresses, like the ogres and the witches we never very
heartily believe in, are, for the most part, the merest stereotypes of
vice and wickedness, always artificial, too often a trifle absurd.
In _Monsieur de Camors_, for example, we have an elaborate study of a
man who has determined to live by the succinct principle, "Evil, be thou
my good"--a succinct enough principle, in all conscience, though
Feuillet requires a lengthy chapter and a suicide to enunciate it. The
idea, if not original, might, in some hands, lend itself to interesting
development; but not so in Feuillet's. From the threshold we feel that
he is handicapped by his theme. It hangs round his neck like the
mill-stone of the adage; it checks his artistic impulses, obscures his
artistic instincts. The quips and cranks, the wreathed smiles, of
Feuillet the humourist, were out of place in a stupendous epopee of this
sort; so, for the sake of a psychological abstraction, which hasn't even
the poor merit of novelty, we must look on ruefully, while our merryman,
divested of cap and bells, proses to the end of his four sad hundred
pages. There are novelists who must work with an abstraction, who can
see their characters and their incidents only as they illustrate an
abstraction; and these also achieve their effects and earn their
rewards. But Feuillet belongs in a different galley. A handful of
human nature, a pleasing countryside, and Paris in the distance--these
are his materials. The philosophy and the plot may come as they will,
and it really doesn't much matter if they never come at all. To give
Feuillet a subject is to attach a chain and ball to his pen. He is
never so debonair, so sympathetic, so satisfying a writer, as when he
has something just short of nothing to write about.
In _Monsieur de Camors_ he has a tremendous deal to write about; his
subject weighs his pen to the earth. The result is a book that's a
monstrosity, and a protagonist who's a monster. Louis de Camors is as
truly a monster as any green dragon that ever spat fire or stole king's
daughters (though by no means so exciting a monster), and he hasn't even
the virtue of being a monster that hangs together. For, while we are
asked to think of him as destitute of natural affections, he is at the
same time shown to us as the fond idolater of his wife, his wife's
mother, and his son. On his son's account, indeed, he goes so far as to
spend a long cold night in a damp and uncomfortable wood, only to be
dismissed in the morning without the embrace, in the hope of gaining
which he has violated his philosophy and taken the chances of
rheumatism. Altogether, a man devoid of affections, who loves his son,
his wife, and his mother-in-law, may be regarded as doing pretty well.
Again (since we are on the chapter of inconsistencies), in that dreary
and pompous letter written to Louis by his father, which expounds the
text of what becomes the son's rule of conduct, he is gravely charged to
fling religion and morality out of the window, but to cherish "honour"
as it were his life. "It is clear that a materialist can't be a saint,
but he can be a gentleman, and that is something," complacently writes
the elder Comte de Camors. Louis, however, though he makes loud acts of
faith in this inexpensive gospel, never hesitates to betray his friend,
to seduce the wife of his benefactor, nor to marry an unsuspecting
child, who loves him, for the sheer purpose of screening an intrigue
with "another lady," which he still intends to carry on. Feuillet,
perhaps, saves his face by heaping upon this impossible being's head all
the punishments that are poetically due to crime, but he doesn't save
_Monsieur de Camors_. It is a dismal volume, uncommonly hard to read.
And yet--art will out; and dismal as it is, it presents to us one of
Feuillet's most captivating women, Louis de Camors' ingenuous little
wife. Listen to her artless pronouncement upon Monsieur's evangel of
"honour." "Mon Dieu," she says, "I'm not sure, but it seems to me that
honour apart from morality is nothing very great, and that morality
apart from religion is nothing at all. It's like a chain: honour hangs
in the last link, like a flower; but when the chain is broken, the
flower falls with the rest."
If, however, Feuillet's villains are failures, his adventuresses and bad
women are grotesquer failures still. And no wonder. His reluctance to
fashion an ugly thing out of material that would, in the natural course
of his impressions, suggest to him none but ideas of beauty, is quite
enough to account for it. Octave Feuillet is too much a gentleman, too
much a _preux chevalier_, to be able to get any intellectual
understanding of a bad woman; the actual operations of a bad woman's
soul are things he can get no "realizing sense" of. So he dresses up a
marionette, which shall do all the wicked feminine things his game
necessitates, which shall plot and poison, wreck the innocent heroine's
happiness, attitudinize as a fiend in woman's clothing, and even, at a
pinch, die a violent death, but which shall never let us forget that it
is stuffed with saw-dust and moved by strings. Madame de Campvallon,
Sabine Tallevaut, Mademoiselle Helouin, even Julia de Trecoeur--the more
they change, the more they are the same: sister-puppets, dolls carved
from a common parent-block, to be dragged through their appointed
careers of improbable naughtiness. You can recognise them at once by
their haunting likeness to the proud beauties of the hair-dresser's
window. They are always statuesque, always cold, reserved, mysterious,
serpentlike, goddesslike--everything, in fine, that bad women of flesh
and blood are not. Octave Feuillet, the wit and the man of the world,
knows this as well as we do; and knowing it, he tries, by verbal
fire-works, to make us forget it. "She charms me--she reminds me of a
sorceress," says some one of Sabine Tallevaut. "Do you notice, she
walks without a sound? Her feet scarcely touch the earth--she walks
like a somnambulist-like Lady Macbeth." It is the old trick, the
traditional _boniment_ of the showman; but not all the _boniments_ in
Feuillet's sack can make us believe in Sabine Tallevaut.
One can recognise Feuillet's bad women, too, by the uncanny influence
they immediately cast upon his men. "More taciturn than ever, absent,
strange, as if she were meditating some profound design, all at once she
seemed to wake; she lifted her long lashes, let her blue eyes wander
here and there, and suddenly looked straight at Camors, who was
conscious of a thrill"--that is how Mme. de Campvallon does it, and the
fact is conclusive, so far as her moral character is in question. None
of Feuillet's good women would ever dream of making a man "thrill" at
her first encounter with him. But Feuillet's bad women will stop at
nothing. Julia de Trecoeur takes her own step-father, a middle-aged,
plain, stout, prosaic country gentleman, and throws him into a paroxysm
that has to be expressed in this wise: "It was a mad intoxication, which
the savour of guilt only intensified. Duty, loyalty, honour, whatsoever
presented itself as an obstacle to his passion, did but exasperate its
fury. The pagan Venus had bitten him in the heart, and injected her
poisons. A vision of Julia's fatal beauty was present without surcease,
in his burning brain, before his troubled eyes. Avidly, in spite of
himself, he drank in her languors, her perfumes, her breath."
_Julia de Trecoeur_ has sometimes been called Feuillet's master-piece.
One eminent critic remarks that in writing it Feuillet "dived into the
vast ocean of human nature, and brought up a pearl." Well, there are
pearls and pearls; there are real pearls and artificial pearls; there
are white pearls and black pearls. It might seem to some of us that
_Julia de Trecoeur_ is an artificial black one. Frankly, as a piece of
literature, the novel is just in three words a fairly good melodrama.
Julia herself is the proper melodramatic heroine. Her beauty is "fatal,"
her passions are ungovernable, and she dearly loves a scene. Now she
contemplates retirement into a convent, now matrimony, now a leap from
the cliffs; and each change of mood is inevitably the occasion for much
ranting and much attitudinizing. Her history is a fairly good
melodrama. That it is not a tip-top melodrama is due to the
circumstance that Feuillet was too intelligent a man to be able to make
it so. He can't keep out his wit; and every now and again his melodrama
forgets itself, and becomes sane comedy. He can't keep out his touches
of things simple and human; the high-flown, unhuman remainder suffers
from the contrast.
Why, one wonders, with his flair for the subtleties of the normal, with
his genius for extracting their charm from trifles, why should Feuillet
have turned his hand to melodrama at all? Is it partly because he lived
in and wrote for a highly melodramatic period--"the dear, good days of
the dear, bad Second Empire"? Partly, too, no doubt, because, as some
one has said, the artist can never forgive, though he can easily forget,
his limitations. Like the comic actor who will not be happy till he has
appeared as Hamlet, the novelist, also, will cherish his unreasoning
aspirations. And then, melodrama is achieved before you know it. Any
incident that is not in itself essentially _un_dramatic will become
melodramatic, when you try to treat it, it will become forced and
stagey, if dramatic incidents are not the spontaneous issue of your
talent. Dramatic incidents are far from being the spontaneous issue of
Feuillet's talent; they are its changelings. His talent is all
preoccupied in fathering children of a quite opposite complexion.
Style, suavity, elegance, sentiment, colour, atmosphere--these are
Feuillet's preoccupations. Action, incident, are, when necessary,
necessary evils. So his action, when he is at his best, loiters,
saunters, or even stops dead-still; until suddenly he remembers that,
after all, his story must some time reach its period, and that something
really must happen to advance it. Thereupon, hurriedly, perfunctorily,
carelessly, he "knocks off" a few pages of incident--of incident fast
and furious--which will, as likely as not, read like the prompt-book of
a play at the Adelphi.
That absurd Sabine Tallevaut, whose feet scarcely touch the earth, with
poison in her hand and adultery in her heart, is the one disfigurement
upon what might otherwise have been Feuillet's most nearly perfect
picture. In spite of her, _La Morte_ remains a work of exquisite and
tender beauty; and I'm not sure whether Aliette de Vaudricourt isn't the
very queen of all his women. If Feuillet was too much a gentleman to be
able to paint a bad woman, he was too much a man not to revel in
painting a charming one. As we pass through his gallery of delightful
heroines, from Aliette de Vaudricourt to Clothilde de Lucan, to Mme. de
Tecle, Marie FitzGerald, "Miss Mary" de Camors, Marguerite Laroque, even
to Jeanne de Maurescamp, we can feel the man's admiration pulsing in
every stroke of the artist's brush. He takes the woman's point of view,
espouses her side of the quarrel, offers himself as her champion
wherever he finds that a champion is needed. And he sticks to his
allegiance even after, as in the case of Jeanne de Maurescamp, she might
seem to have forfeited her claim to it. Of Jeanne he can still bring
himself to say, at the end of _L'Histoire d'une Parisienne_: "Decidedly,
this angel had become a monster; but the lesson of her too-true story
is, that, in the moral order, no one is born a monster. God makes no
monsters. It is man who makes them."
In this instance, however, Feuillet is, perhaps, rather the apologist
than the champion. His contention is that Jeanne was by nature
virtuous, and that her virtue has been destroyed by the stupidity and
the brutality of her ill-chosen husband. But Feuillet has too fine and
too judicious a wit to insist upon the note of strenuousness. Seeing the
woman's point of view, he sees its humours as well as its pathos.
Admitting that men for the most part are grossly unworthy of her, and
that woman has infinitely the worst of it in the arrangements of
society, admitting and deploring it, he doesn't profess to know how to
set it right; he has no practical reform to preach. His business is to
divert us, and, if he must be serious, to be serious gaily and
charmingly. And perhaps he is most serious, not when composing an
epitaph for Jeanne de Maurescamp, but when he is lightly saying (in the
person of the Comtesse Jules): "Always remember, my poor dear, that
women are born to suffer--and men to be suffered."
Charmingly serious himself, Feuillet's heroines likewise are always
serious, in their different charming ways. They may be wilful and
capricious, like Marguerite Laroque, or fond of the excitements of the
world, like Mme. de Rias, or wise in their generation, like Mme. de la
Veyle, but they are always womanly and human at the red-ripe of the
heart, and they are almost always religious. A sceptic, scepticlike,
Feuillet utterly discountenances scepticism in woman. Even his most
recusant of masculine unbelievers, the Vicomte de Vaudricourt, proclaims
his preference for a pious wife. "Not, of course," he says, "that I
exaggerate the moral guarantees offered by piety, or that I mistake it
for a synonym of virtue. But still it is certain that with women the
idea of duty is rarely dissociated from religious ideas. Because
religion doesn't keep all of them straight, it is an error to conclude
that it keeps none of them straight; and it's always well to be on the
safe side." Elsewhere Feuillet gives us his notion of the moral outlook
of the woman who is not religious. Evil for her, he tells us, ceases to
be evil, and becomes simply _inconvenance_. 'Tis a very mannish, a very
Frenchmannish, way of viewing the thing.
One has sometimes heard it maintained that only women can reveal
themselves with perfect grace in a form so intimate as letters or a
diary; that a man's hand is apt to be too heavy, his manner too
self-conscious. Perhaps it is Feuillet's sympathy with women that has
made him the dab he is at this womanly art. In _La Morte_, for
instance, we learn vastly more of Bernard's character from his diary
than we should from thrice the number of pages of third-personal
exposition. The letters from Marie to her mother, in _Monsieur de
Camors_, furnish the single element of relief in that lugubrious
composition. Even those that pass between Rias and Mme. de Lorris, in
_Un Mariage dans le Monde_--though their subject-matter is sufficiently
depressing, though the man is an egotistical cad, and the great lady who
is giving him her help and pity ought rather to despise and spurn
him--are exceedingly good and natural letters; and the letter from Mme.
de Rias to Kevern, which ends the book, is a very jewel of a letter.
But it is in the diary of his poor young man that Feuillet's command of
the first person singular attains its most completely satisfying
results.
_Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_ is a tale of youth, for the young;
and the eldest of us may count himself still young if he can still enjoy
it. Here we have romance pure and simple, a thing of glamour all
compact; and the danger-line that so definitely separates romance from
absurdity, yet leaves them so perilously near together, is never
crossed. The action passes in the country, and in the most delectable
sort of country at that--the country of the appreciative and imaginative
cit. Before all things a Parisian, Feuillet is never particularly happy
in presenting Paris. His Paris is correct enough in architecture and
topography, no doubt; but the spirit of Paris, the whatever it is which
makes Paris Paris, and not merely a large town, somehow evades him.
Possibly he knew his Paris too well; familiarity had bred a kind of
inability to see, to focus, a kind of "staleness." Anyhow, it is when
he gets away from Paris that he wakes to the opportuneness and the
opportunities of scenic backgrounds. His eye, "stale" to town, is now
all eagerness, all freshness. Impressions of beauty crowd upon him. He
sees the country as it is doubtful whether the countryman ever sees
it--the countryman who has been surfeited with it, who has long since
forgotten its first magical effect. He brings to the country the
sensitiveness which is the product of the city's heat and strife. Dew
and wild flowers, the green of grass and trees, the music of birds, the
flutter of their wings, the pure air, the wide prospects, the changing
lights--it is to the appreciative and imaginative townsman that these
speak their finest message.
But Feuillet is more than a townsman: he is a teller of fairy-tales. To
him the country is a free playground for his fancy. There beautiful
ladies and gallant knights have nothing to do but to love and to sing;
and there, without destroying our illusion, he can leave them to live
happily forever after. The Brittany, in which Maxime and Marguerite
meet and misunderstand and woo and wed, is not that northwestern corner
of France that one can reach in a few hours by steamer from Southampton;
it is a Brittany of fairy woods and streams and castles, that never was,
save in the poet's dream. For if others of Feuillet's novels have been
only in part fairy-tales, or only rather like fairy-tales, the _Romance
of a Poor Young Man_ is a fairy-tale wholly and absolutely. The
personages of the story are the invariable personages of the fairy-tale:
the prince disguised as a wood-cutter, in the Marquis de Champcey
disguised as a farm-bailiff; the haughty princess, who will not love,
yet loves despite her will, and is rewarded by the wood-cutter's
appearing in all the prince's splendour at the proper time, in
Marguerite Laroque; the bad prince and the bad princess, in M. de
Bevallon and Mlle. Helouin; the good magician, in M. Laubepin; and the
delightfullest of conceivable fairy godmothers, in Mlle. de Porhoet.
And the progress of the story is the wonted progress of the fairy-tale.
There is hardship, but it is overcome; there are perils, but they are
turned; misconceptions, but they are cleared up. There are empty
pockets, but there is the bag of gold waiting to fill them. The
marvellous never shocks our credulity, the longest-armed coincidences
seem the most natural happenings in the world. We are not in the least
surprised when, at the right moment, the bag of gold appears at Maxime's
feet, enabling him to marry; it is the foregone consequence of his
having a fairy godmother. We don't even raise the eyebrow of doubt when
the Laroques contemplate relinquishing their fortune to the poor, so
that Marguerite may come to her lover empty-handed; that is the accepted
device of the fairy-tale for administering to the proud princess her
well-deserved humiliation. In one small detail only does the fairy-tale
teller lose himself, and let the novelist supplant him; that is where he
implies that the bad prince and princess, after their wicked wiles had
been discovered, took the train to Paris. They did nothing of the sort.
They were turned into blocks of stone, and condemned to look on at the
happiness of the good prince and princess from the terrace of the
Chateau de Laroque.
But it must not be supposed, because the personages of the _Romance of a
Poor Young Man_ are fairy-tale personages, that therefore they are not
human personages. It is, on the contrary, the humanity of its
personages that makes your fairy-tale interesting. You stick to human
men and women, you merely more or less improve the conditions of their
existence, you merely revise and amend a little the laws of the external
universe--an easy thing to do, in spite of the unthinking people who
prate of those laws as immutable. Then the fun consists in seeing how
human nature will persist and react. Surely none of Feuillet's heroines
is more engagingly human than Marguerite Laroque. It is true that we
see her only through the eyes of a chronicler who happens to be
infatuated with her, but we know what discount to allow for that. We
are confident from her first entrance that if, as we hope, our poor
young man's head is screwed on as poor young men's heads should be,
Marguerite will turn it. We learn that she is capricious, therefore
Maxime will be constant; that she is proud, therefore, in all humility,
he will be prouder; that she is humble, therefore, in all pride, he will
humble himself at her feet. But antecedent to all this, and just
because his ostensible business in Brittany is the management of the
Laroques' estate, no one needs to warn us that his real business will be
the conquest of the Laroques' daughter. We can foresee with half an eye
that the affairs of the estate are affairs which our disguised marquis
will conscientiously neglect. Indeed, Mme. Laroque herself seems to
have been haunted by something of the same premonition. What does she
say to the sous-prefet? "Mon Dieu, ne m'en parlez pas; il-y-a la un
mystere inconcevable. Nous pensons que c'est quelque prince deguise....
Entre nous, mon cher sous-prefet, je crois bien que c'est un
tres-mauvais intendant, mais vraiment c'est un homme tres-agreable."
She might have added "un homme tres-digne." For if we have a fault to
find with Maxime, it is that he seems just possibly a thought too
"digne." But that is a fault common to so many men in fiction. French
novelists, like English lady novelists, are terribly apt to make their
men too "digne"--when they don't make them too unspeakably _indigne_.
Maxime, however, we mustn't forget, is his own portraitist, and we'll
hope in this detail the portrait errs. For the rest, we are content to
accept it as he paints it. He is a poor young man, but he is also a
fairy prince. Therefore he can vaunt himself as an ordinary poor young
man could hardly do with taste. He can perform and narrate his
prodigies of skill and valour without offending. He can rescue an
enormous Newfoundland dog from a raging torrent, for example, with the
greatest ease in the world, an exploit you or I might have found
ticklish, and he can tell us of it afterward, a proceeding you or I
might have shrunk from as vainglorious. For Maxime is a fairy prince;
the dog belongs to the fairy princess; and the bad prince, the rival,
who is standing by, doesn't know how to swim. Again, with splendid
indifference, he can accomplish and record his leap from the Tour d'
Elven to save the fairy princess from a situation that might, in
Fairyland, have compromised her; hadn't the princess unjustly impugned
his honour, and insinuated that the situation was one he had
deliberately brought to pass? "Monsieur le Marquis de Champcey, y a
t-il eu beaucoup de laches dans votre famille avant vous?" superbly
demands Marguerite; and we can see her kindling eye, the scornful curl
of her lip, we can hear the disdainful tremor of her voice. Maxime
would be a poor-spirited poor young man, indeed, if, after that, he
should hesitate to jump. And he has his immediate compensation.
"Maxime! Maxime!" cries the haughty princess, now all remorse, "par
grace, par pitie! au nom du bon Dieu, parlez-moi! pardonnez-moi!" So
that, though the prince goes away with a broken arm, the lover carries
exultancy in his heart.
Is Maxime perhaps just a thought too "digne," also, in his relations
with his little sister--when he visits her at school, for instance, and
promises to convey the bread she cannot eat to some deserving beggar?
At the moment he is the most deserving beggar he chances to know of, but
he is resolved to keep his beggary a secret from Helene. "Cher Maxime,"
says she, "a bientot, n'est-ce pas? Tu me diras si tu as rencontre un
pauvre, si tu lui as donne mon pain, et s'il l'a trouve bon." And
Maxime, in his journal: "Oui, Helene, j'ai rencontre un pauvre, et je
lui ai donne ton pain, qu'il a emporte comme une proie dans sa mansarde
solitaire, et il l'a trouve bon; mais c'etait un pauvre sans courage,
car il a pleure en devorant l'aumone de tes petites mains bien-aimees.
Je te dirai tout cela, Helene, car il est bon que tu saches qu'il y a
sur la terre des souffrances plus serieuses que tes souffrances
d'enfant: je te dirai tout, excepte le nom du pauvre." It certainly
_is_ "digne," isn't it? Is it a trifle too much so? Isn't it a trifle
priggish, a trifle preachy? Is it within the limits of pure pathos? Or
does it just cross the line? I don't know.
I am rather inclined to think that Maxime is at his best--at once most
human and most fairy princelike--in his relations with the pre-eminently
human fairy Porhoet. He is entirely human, and weak, and nice, when he
blurts out to her the secret of his high birth. Hadn't she just been
boasting of her own, and invidiously citing Monsieur l'intendant as a
typical plebeian? "En ce qui me concerne, mademoiselle," he has the
human weakness to retort, "vous vous trompez, car ma famille a eu
l'honneur d'etre alliee a la votre, et reciproquement." He remains
human and weak throughout the somewhat embarrassing explanations that
are bound to follow; and if, in their subsequent proceedings, after she
has adopted him as "mon cousin," he will still from time to time become
a trifle priggish and a trifle preachy, we must remember that mortal
man, in the hands of a French novelist, has to choose between that and a
career of profligacy.
It is by his _Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_ that Feuillet is most
widely known outside of France; it is by this book that he will "live,"
if he is to live. Certainly it is his freshest, his sincerest, his most
consistently agreeable book.